Preservation and protection of the natural environment has never been a priority in our annual Budgets; ALL Finance Ministers have taken it for granted and have treated it as an infinite resource rather than a living entity to be nurtured and carefully harvested on a sustainable basis. In July 2014 I had written a blog on these pages about precisely this: Budget 2014- Shortchanging the Environment. Eleven years down the line this catastrophic deficiency in planning persists, even though a new, and compelling, dimension has been added now with the acceleration of Climate Change (CC). The need now is, not only to provide public funding for measures to counter CC (adaptation, mitigation) but also for rehabilitation of those directly affected by it- poor farmers, landless labourers, fishermen, nomadic tribes. Unfortunately (and predictably) this Budget, like its predecessors, does none of this.

We should perhaps have expected this from the tone of the Economic Survey 2026, released a couple of weeks earlier. In it, the Chief Economic Advisor blatantly bats for growth and neoliberalism at the cost of the environment. Defying all science he states that cutting carbon emissions should not be our top priority, and that "a 3*Celsius world would be a liveable one"(!) Confounding all evidence and scientific global consensus, he goes on to maintain that "growth and prosperity strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability.." Yes, sir, they do, but only if  done in a sustainable and ecologically friendly manner, which is not how it is happening in India. Maybe, if the Economic Advisor had paid more attention to what a fellow economist (without any........

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